The Pills

As a metaphor to The Matrix movie, in particular the scene where Neo is granted a choice between a red and a blue pill, one leading to realizing Neo's real condition whilst the latter leading to a continuation, the "pill" metaphor extends to describe the Weltanschau of people by attributing certain value based on the color of the pill that they are associated with.

Some of the pills in motion are the following:

  • red, an individual that has comprehended the inner-workings of certain things and is thus elated by comparison to others,
  • blue, an individual that has not yet realized what is going on around them and tends to regurgitate the dogma of the current trend,
  • black, generally attributed to people of high cynicism that do not subscribe to either red or blue pills but rather tend to disprove them both

The Drone

Given complex social structures, in a social sense, a drone is an adjective attributed to an individual of very little free will where their thinking patterns are grossly determined by either their social bonds or global trends.

The metaphor is derived from the technological property of a "drone" that implicitly lacks the ability to take action based on their own best judgment, yet driven outside the boundaries of determinable actions such that even if decisions are carried out, a "drone" would more or less follow a predetermined, preprogrammed or imprinted pattern.

Given the former, it is important to emphasize that the concept of a "drone" does not exclusively mean that a person is controlled but rather that that person lacks the self-critical property that would grant them the opportunity of free and original acting.

Islam for Star Wars Nerds

Not original, yet an interesting artistic comparison.

Data Rot

In general terms, "bit rot" is the label given to the process where electromagnetic medium loses its magnetic properties leading to the accumulation of non-fatal errors in the storage medium thereby partially or fully corrupting data.

"Data rot" is an extension of the terminology in the absence of a degradable medium, such that the decay becomes a property of the data itself rather than a property of the storage medium.

Genetically speaking, for example, the teleomeres of DNA strands tend to shorten as cell division occurs.

Qualia

Qualia refers to the perceived properties of an interaction rather than the interaction itself. For example: "what does it feel to eat a lemon", "seeing the redness of the sky", "the taste of sugar".

Vampires vs. Werewolves

In some esoteric circles, people of Jewish descent are seen as vampires whereas all the rest are seen as werewolves.

(Techno-)Breatharianism

Breatharianism is the claimed property of a person to live without consuming food or in some cases water. When adding the "techno" qualitative, the implication is that the development of technology will lead to a stage where people will be able to live without sustenance or that sustenance could be provided through technological means.

Kek vs. Lol

Whilst "lol" is the abbreviation for "laughing out loud", "kek" is an opposing abbreviation for "laughing out loud".

The origins of "kek" can be traced back to the online game World of Warcraft, by Blizzard Entertainment, where players from two different factions, the alliance and the horde, would have their words scrambled when they tried to communicate with each other.

That is, whenever a player from a faction would type some text on a public channel, a player from the opposing faction would not be able to read the text since it would have been scrambled by the game. Even though, the scrambling is arbitrary, for some reason the letters "lol", as a singularity of the scrambling, would always map to the letters "kek".

That being said, "lol" and "kek" could extend as propagandist terminology (ie: the us vs. them) where picking one form over the other could implicitly, through syntax, express disagreement as an opposing laughter.

It might be frequently the case that people using the abbreviation "kek" do not know the actual origins of the syntax yet have been trained implicitly to use "kek" as a sign of cynicism or disbelief with the matter at hand.

Strawmannning vs. Steelmanning

Strawmanning describes a fallacy in oratorics where an argument is replaced by a different yet lesser arguments thereby hoping to win a dispute by disproving a weaker argument. Steelmanning, is the reverse thereof.

Eugenic Dating (Algorithm)

Eugenic dating generally describes mediums of matchmaking where people are selected based on their racial profiles. Unfortunately, due to the targeted qualifier "eugenic", such mediums sometimes appear highly creepy or unstable.

By adding the term "algorithm" the idea hinges on the fact that many match-making algorithms for online dating platforms are a black-box such that in some cases it might be difficult to tell whether a participant got a fair match or whether the match was manipulated intentionally.

Nominative Determinism

Nominative determinism is defined as the tendency of individuals to drift towards jobs that are in some way related to their name.

Memes

A collection of meme templates can be found in the subculture assets section, sorted by file name, where the file name represents the original phrase as a hint to its usage in the original context. Memes represent the evolution of caricatures that leverage some form of referential subculture out of various information mediums and are designed to highlight irony in various social contexts. Typically memes are generated from well-trodden stereotypical situations, most of the time resulting from propaganda, referential moments within human subculture as well as naturally evolving behaviour patterns. Sometimes, memes can be considered as a double-mockery where the meaning expressed by the meme also mocks the original content implicitly.

While cataloging memes one curiosity is whether the entire corpus of memes gathered can be considered a fixed set. For instance, knowyourmeme.org has tracked the popularity of memes over time showing that whilst some memes tend to be forgotten (an irony in itself, given the Star Wars referential meme "It's an older meme Sir, but it checks out.") other memes are still popular and very referential. The fact that some memes have a long lifespan compared to others, while at the same time having a sedimentation effect where a meme becomes so referential that is immediately recognized, raises the question whether the construction of ideographic languages (ie: hieroglyphs) has been a progressive process where some idioms appear while others are forgotten, which, would not be new to any form of language whether ideomatic or not. It would be feasible that the entire corpus of memes could be considered a ideographic language itself, akin to Blissymbols, or a semantography, but with organic origins rather than being artificially or deliberately constructed. As it turns out, due to the popularity of a given meme, certain memes seem to be references more times than other such that the meme becomes a well-established idiom. One explanation for the construction of a new form of idographic language could be the consideration that memes tend to entspring from echo-chamber environments, such as propaganda, where the same irony is used repetitively regardless of different contexts. By using a meme an unifying context-free ideogram could be used to highlight the underlying propaganda in order to allow people to build connections between the various contexts based on an unified understanding of the underlying trope.

Furthermore, within the subculture, and given the construction of a meme language, it is at this time of writing plausible to decouple the commentary typically accompanying the ideogram whilst still retaining the meaning of the underlying metaphor. In other words, the evocation of a meme template, even without contextual help, such as a commentary, could be sufficient to people that have knowledge of the idiom to be able to identify the similarity between the current context and the original context that a meme was constructed from. Sometimes, memes have the capacity of conveying the social dynamics of a given incident much faster than words, just by building links between current events and previously established antecedents through a process of categorization.

Due to their unique capacity to categorize, memes are sometimes deemed to be a form of magic in a social denomination, and related to prophecy (via irony), that allows magic users to quickly identify some underlying social dynamics without having to study each case in part.


fuss/subculture.txt ยท Last modified: 2023/02/06 14:01 by office

Access website using Tor Access website using i2p Wizardry and Steamworks PGP Key


For the contact, copyright, license, warranty and privacy terms for the usage of this website please see the contact, license, privacy, copyright.